“Having played separately the role of a composer and a curator outside of this programme, I was now learning to be both at the same time. I had these two personalities — still very much in development — which had to learn to work together.”
Euchar Gravina
Euchar Gravina is a composer and artistic director from Malta, based in London. Recent commissions and projects include works recorded or performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra, Aldeburgh Festival, GBSR Duo, a touring opera for children for Teatru Malta (in collaboration with Three Palaces Festival), and a concerto for Teatru Manoel and the Valletta International Baroque Festival. Euchar was composer-in-residence with Quay Voices at Sage Gateshead 2017/18, a Britten Pears Young Artist 2019/22, and a composer on the Peter Reynolds Composition Studio 2020/1. Euchar holds the position of Artistic Director at St John’s Waterloo, The Bridge At Waterloo and Waterloo Festival, appointed in 2019 ahead of a redevelopment project which has transformed the venue into an accessible and inclusive hub for arts and the community. He read composition at the Royal Academy of Music with Simon Bainbridge and Edmund Finnis.
Euchar has been recently appointed to the London Symphony Orchestra’s Jerwood Composer+ programme, curating two events on the scheme throughout 2026: ħsejjes iduru, iduru in Feburary 2026, and the upcoming Once upon a place, taking place on Saturday 3rd October at LSO St. Luke’s. Towards the end of the summer, Patrick Ellis met up with Euchar Gravina outside Waterloo Station to discuss composition and curation, vintage recordings, wind brass bands in Malta, his time during the Jerwood Composer+ programme, and much more…
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Patrick/PRXLUDES: Back in February, we attended your first LSO Jerwood Composer+ event ħsejjes iduru, iduru at LSO St. Luke’s, incorporating archival recordings from your home country of Malta. Could you give an overview of the concert?
Euchar Gravina: The concert back in February was centred around the theme of how composers use found material, taken from other music, within their own work. It started from an interest that I had been having over the past couple of years. I tend to have an existing piece of music to reference [as] a starting point: by that, I don’t necessarily mean a piece from the canon or a written score — it could even be a recording of a performance (I have a particular soft spot for old recordings). What draws me in is how a piece is performed, rather than just the notes themselves.
I’ve known about a set of archival recordings from back home for quite a while, and I was very interested to get to know them a bit more and find the opportunity to work with them. It felt like the LSO Jerwood Composer+ would be a great opportunity to explore this idea; because as part of the programme, I am not just a composer, I am also the curator of the concert.
I spent a huge amount of time going through these recordings — courtesy of the Magna Żmien Foundation — and sitting with them. I broadly knew that I wanted to write a piece based on taking inspiration from the sound of these recordings, and then build a concert around that. And so [the concert] became a reflection of how composers approach this method of working with found materials — be it a score, performance or even a genre — in several different ways.
The concert was programmed for four musicians (violin, viola, cello, and piano) with a mixture of works for solos, duos, groups. You curated the pieces in the concert — can you tell me about which pieces you ended up programming and why?
In Cassandra Miller’s ‘Daylonging, Slacktide’, she takes a recording of two brothers from Georgia singing. What she draws from it isn’t just the notes or the melody, but the finer nuances of that particular performance on that particular recording.
The Daniele Ghisi [sections from a larger work, ‘Weltliche’] is a little bit more straightforward. It was built around these secular cantatas by Bach and done in such a beautiful way — not just through the reworking of musical material, but through the instrument’s acoustics, [and] also through sounds from the outside of other kinds of found objects that were being reinterpreted through pitch.
With Clarence Barlow, it is a crazy, difficult piece… I am in awe of it. -laughs- It took all of these canonic pieces and reworked them into something completely new through a series of mathematical processes. And the Liza Lim was on the other end. It took the performative element of Swedish folk music and reinterpreted them into the piece — and which asked the performer to do something similar in writing their own version of the last movement.
So that was the string that took it through. For my own piece, ‘Dwawar (“ħsejjes iduru, iduru”)’, I worked with snippets from recordings from 1930s Malta — some of the earliest we have from the islands. Forgotten for several decades, they have been rediscovered and properly archived over the last decade or so by Magna Żmien. It includes a wide variety of music: there are songs, orchestral music, church music, opera, arias, overtures, theatre works, caraberet-style songs, a real mix. So apparently, it was a successful project which took place over several years — and I think that it was only the advent of World War II, as well as new technologies in recording, that made them be eventually forgotten.
Talk me through the planning of the event. What was it like to curate as well as compose for the performance?
I had settled on the theme by the time I began the Jerwood Composer+ programme, so there wasn’t the need to spend time searching for it. Instead, most of my time went into listening, researching, figuring out which instruments I’d be working with, what music I could programme for the event, what the budget’s limitations were, liaising with publishers, and so on.
And then there was the process of engaging with the musicians if they are happy with the technicalities of music — for instance, the Barlow is an extremely challenging piece and would require a lot of buy-in from musicians willing to go for it. Not to mention the need to make sure enough rehearsal time can be programmed into the tight schedules. That took a good three or four months starting April / May until September — and then once we settled on the programme and the musicians were on board with the music, we moved onto more logistical things. For example, the staging of the concert and how it was going to be presented. Later on the lighting came, as did the electronics, and finding out the limitations of the space. Each of these considerations were all overlapping, and things staggered one after the other.
On top of that, I had to compose my piece… -laughs- I decided to write quite a long work — lasting 25 minutes — which I hadn’t done in a long time. I think up to that point, I only wrote long pieces in a theatrical setting, which is a different way to compose [compared to concert music]. So it was a big challenge, especially in the time I had to put it all together.
How did you find writing over in a longer-form concert piece compared to some of your past theatrical works?
In terms of comparing it to more theatrical pieces, there was the challenge of building a whole narrative from scratch without relying on text or drama. For that, I’ve let the found materials guide me: both acoustically, in terms of the possibilities of their transformations, but also in terms of their context, their inherent drama in the original recordings — be it folk, church music, or even theatrical sketches.
Relatedly, what I also found interesting was that some of my last couple of pieces — especially three or four years ago — were made up of short fragments put together. I thought that I would be doing the same thing with this work, a string of “scenes” each focused on a different found material. But instead, I decided to hone in on a small selection of recorded materials and settled on two expansive movements, with their drama unfolding on a much longer timeframe.
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When working alongside your own self-imposed brief from this project, what were the challenges with having an already determined programme?
There was certainly less freedom when it came to finally writing my piece. Being responsible for the rest of the programme made me think about the writing in a very different way — you’re looking simultaneously in and out, which at the beginning wasn’t too comfortable. For both of the concerts, I’d like to think I have taken the curation very seriously — even more with the [upcoming] second concert. In turn, that put huge self-expectations on my writing. I’ve had plenty of experiences, like so many composers, of having written a piece which went into a concert following no specific or general theme. In this case, it was very different! I had to write a piece to fit within an entire block of music I’ve already curated.
But that was the challenge I was looking to take on. In fact, I walked into the Jerwood Composer+ programme specifically because it’s a composer-curator opportunity — it felt like the next step to develop myself. Having played separately the role of a composer and a curator outside of this programme, I was now learning to be both at the same time. I had these two personalities — still very much in development — which had to learn to work together. And it took me a long time to bridge those two facets together — [to] leave my composer hat on and be a little bit free without constantly thinking about the bigger picture. It wasn’t easy, but I would like to think that it worked out. It was important as a composer to allow myself to sit down and be playful, and to say to myself “this is where I’m going with the material”.
Did you find your brain flickering between being a composer and a curator a lot during the writing process?
Quite a lot, actually. Especially thinking about pacing. I spent a huge amount of time deciding on the pacing of a concert and the order of each piece in the programme — especially with [that] first project, where we specifically asked the players to go from one piece seamlessly to the other, so that the whole event was one throughline experience. There were a lot of these negotiations between my two practices — because where do you start and where do you stop? It was a challenge, but I’m glad that I took it on.
In the programme note for ħsejjes iduru, iduru, you mention that the event was based around your recent obsession with found sounds. Could you tell me more about how you first became interested in found sounds?
My fascination with using found recordings began just before the pandemic, and in a way almost by accident. A few years before that, I had been asked to write a piece for a banda (a traditional wind brass band) in Malta, which was kind of similar to the brass bands that you have here in the North of England. Here they were perhaps more associated with unions and coal-mining communities — but back home, these bands are everywhere. In almost every town and village, there would be one or two bands, and they are the basis of the music education back home. There is a long history that dates back to around 150-160 years ago; there is quite a longstanding tradition. And their reach is not just musical but also social.
A year or two after this piece, I was asked to provide a piece for an album being put together by the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra. As there wasn’t time to write a work from scratch, I settled on transcribing and developing the work I wrote for the wind brass band. I had loved the way the piece was played by the band, though there were lots of things that didn’t come out the way I envisioned them. I found these elements rather charming in their own way, and decided to turn elements of the recorded live performance by the banda into a tape part for the final orchestral version. It took off from then!
Do you remember the first time you used found sounds and recordings in a piece of yours?
Later on, a commission came where I was asked to write a piece for pianist Gabi Sultana — an excellent musician from Malta who has dedicated a lot of her energy to new music — and I thought this would be a good time to work with this material, try something a bit more daring. And from this piece, ‘medea’, I kept going on with that approach leading to the work I’ve been writing for the Jerwood Composer+.
There’s something about the old charm of the recordings which keeps me going back to them; not only to listen but also to drive my writing. I guess it has to do with that very human thread across generations — their take on this age-old practice of singing and making music. But the act of working with them is perhaps inspired by life back home in Malta. For example, all these old buildings around which are steeped in history, but have been transformed into something functional — like my youth club, which was housed in this quasi crumbling 16th century old house (which was also a police station, a shelter, a catechism centre over time, amongst other roles). But I never thought about the aged-ness of the place, or its storied history whilst in it. That only came later with distance. There’s something moving about the adaptation of something that has been passed on over generations — and perhaps that’s the starting point of my conversation with these old recordings.
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With those kinds of works, you are essentially investigating using these recordings as source material. As time has gone on and you have become more confident with this way of working, what have you refined and filtered down or out of your process?
I have been slowly self-investigating what the crux of what I am looking for is — more than simply “here’s a library of sound to work with”. It always starts from that: you find a recording, you break it down. I rarely use long excerpts from a recording. I find a moment when an interesting chord is played (or “not well” played), or the way it is tuned, or the way the inflection of a word is happening – it’s the human presence in the recording. This has been the process all along; but over time I have become more aware of it, of what really draws you in, which has helped me pick source material much more discretely.
With the piece from February [‘Dwawar (“ħsejjes iduru, iduru”)’], the moment with the children’s choir at the end of the piece, for example… I had barely looked into the words that they were singing — because it was intonation, and the way the singing came across, which cut through to me. There is something that rings back to how I used to listen to choirs when I was a child. Perhaps a sense of comfort and relatability comes from that, which led to the whole simple idea behind the second movement.
How do you view the relationship between the written material and the found sounds? Do you see it as something to embellish the texture of the piece? Or is it used as an impetus to write something around the source material?
I think that it’s a little bit of both. I rarely take the sounds out of their context totally. With ‘medea’, the piece slowly melts and moulds the live piano part with the tape in a gradual process where the piano stops being an accompaniment. With ‘Dwawar (“ħsejjes iduru, iduru”)’, it was the context and the story behind the recordings which initially drew me in but equally it was the spectrum of beautiful sounds and great colours. That came from [an] even more closer inspection — when I had the chance to really focus on short, second-long snippets of sounds.
How it’s then broken down and turned into a new work is perhaps a different story, which would also involve a bit of theatre or drama (though this was initially rather unconsciously done!).
How has the source material informed your own written musical material? What has it bought out in your approach?
It has given me the freedom to really hone into what and how I like to write — relying on intuition to finding found material — rather than a huge focus on building that material from scratch. I think I was quite scared of working this way before, but the more I’ve done it, the more I’ve realised it’s how I enjoy proposing projects too. A bit of the curator comes out in me; not creating every sound from scratch, but shaping what’s already there. That is something that I find incredibly joyful and meaningful. Through this process of starting off from existing materials, I am realising more that that is how I would like to be composing. I guess that doesn’t say a lot about the material itself but rather about my process. I like to think that my material has helped me come to terms with the sounds that I would love to write.
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What I get from that fundamentally is that there is a play between the “macro” and the “micro” in a piece. You are more of a “micro” composer — whereby you like working with the finer details.
Exactly. I can spend two or three days tweaking a sample of material, finding the right “thing”, which maybe is not the best use of my time sometimes — especially when you have got a deadline screaming at you. -laughs- But I’ve come to adapt the way I write and what I write through the investigation of found music, and it has allowed me to make composing a joyful experience again. That playing with the material is where the composing happens for me, rather than the focus on starting from nothing. Using this method, it allows me to challenge myself within a (self-imposed) limited box — perhaps set by the theme or the sounds available — and helps with writing the musical material.
It’s as though the recordings reduce the overwhelm of a blank piece of paper.
And out of those pre-determined decisions made from the found recording, you can build harmonies, structures, etc. That gives me more of a direction when writing, and also a sense of it all being more organic and grounded. Again, it makes me think of the curator hat within the composition process!
Let’s look ahead to your second Jerwood Composer+ showcase, Once upon a place, taking place on Saturday 3rd October. Is there anything that you can tell us about?
The concert’s programme is engrained in the idea of place — with a set of pieces that remember or trace or even make up their own spaces (though here I’m referring more to space as a certain idea of location, with all its context and baggage, rather than purely abstract space).
Partly, this theme came from working at LSO St. Luke’s during my first project. Looking into the history of the venue, I became more aware of its history beyond its current use as a concert venue and rehearsal space (reminding also of St. John’s Waterloo!). So I thought: why don’t I lean into this a little bit more? Wouldn’t the reusing of this space (which went from being a church, to an abandoned site, to the beating heart of the London Symphony Orchestra) also resonate with the idea behind my first project — as another form of reuse?
It also spoke to a certain familiarity from such spaces — having been brought up in Catholic Malta, churches were very much part of my childhood, and my engagement with such places has continued since (including my current work as artistic director at St. John’s). These places are also often more than just a place of worship. They are hubs of locality, a place for communal rituals and at times also a community, arts, and music centre.
So when it came to putting together the programme, I went for some pieces that draw on real locations. Christopher Cerrone’s ‘Double Happiness’ collects these sentimental souvenirs from a summer journey he made across Italy. Luigi Nono’s ‘A Pierre. Dell’azzurro silenzio, inquietum’ is as much an homage to his friend Boulez as it is to his native Venice’s tradition of spatialised polychoral music at San Marco. And Hollie Harding’s ‘Aepyronis’ is built around sounds from Madagascar — it sets on a journey then towards an imagined prehistoric place.
Another set of works, such as Marc Sabat’s ‘Backyard Summer Patio’, are more about the universal in the unspecified: any patio, any summer, anywhere. And similarly Eden Lonsdale‘s ‘Breathing Skies and The Distant Bells of Fulfilment’, which will feature the New London Chamber Choir, opens a window onto something melancholy and just out of reach — an everywhere and nowhere all at once.
We’ve previously touched upon the seesaw between working as a composer and a curator in recent years and especially as part of the Jerwood Composer+ programme. How has curation influenced your composition practice more broadly?
On a practical level, it has made composing easier and harder at the same. Easier in the sense that it has given me more tools to work with, and a wider understanding of live performance — the way that I structure things, and the way I listen to a piece with its context, [is similar to] the way a programmer or a musician might also look inside a work from a thematic perspective.
At the same time, that made it really challenging at times because of the heavy hand of the “curator” whilst writing; of taking into consideration all the many layers that go into a programme and trying to manage that against the playfulness that comes with writing. There are many times when I can’t guarantee to myself where the piece is going as I write — which in itself can be a source of great joy and drive — but which can cause that clash with the other side of my role on this programme.
Have you found yourself trying to loosen up the pre-determined themes/concepts that you are writing in the piece? And then thought, if someone else was doing this, then I would be annoyed being the curator…
That level of overarching thematic control over a piece, from before it’s written, is something I think about a lot. The theme of the first concert came from what I actually wanted to write and the programming of the concert gave me the setting – of where the piece would fit, of making space for it. But this “curating” of the work is also happening before I’m writing, so that proved challenging at times.
My new work is going to be the final piece in the concert on the 3rd October, and I know exactly what’s going to happen before then. Whilst writing now, I haven’t let myself stop thinking about that; I’m constantly thinking about what the pacing of the second half is going to be and how that should have an impact on the pacing of my work. But also, at some point, you just have to let go — and usually that’s encouraged by a deadline getting a little too close! -laughs-
I guess naturally all this goes back to our bread and butter, which is to say we are working here with listening. There’s your ear as a composer, as a curator, as an audience member, and so on. It’s such a tricky balancing act, because you have to rely on the confidence (and subjectivity!) of your own “changing” ears. I don’t think that during the writing process I’m really exclusively one way or the other — I’m constantly in flux between each of those mindsets — but I think being aware of the different perspectives helps.
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Reflecting over the period of being a Jerwood Composer+ composer, how do you think it has informed your work as both a composer and as a curator?
I think that the first fundamental change was that it brought me back to composing after a few years of not doing so — at least on such a scale. I had been writing some short works, which I was very pleased about, but there wasn’t much space to really delve into large projects.
Over the last couple of years — particularly following the reopening of St. John’s Waterloo — my work and responsibilities there took a priority, which meant composing had to take a secondary role. That also meant that my pacing had changed a lot. Work at St. John’s is very fast paced; a mix of reacting and doing, of curating and managing. It’s the kind of work which I can delve into and get done, in a way, which is very much unlike composing where sitting quietly and working slowly is usually the norm. So that was a great challenge to tackle when I sat down to write my first piece for the February showcase — to embrace different pacings in work.
The Jerwood Composer+ programme has also broken down my fairly strict separation of my composition work and my curating work. As an artistic director at St. John’s, I am very focused on curating other people’s work, be it music or exhibitions or heritage projects. This programme has put an (at times uncomfortable) spotlight on me as a composer and curator at the same time, and pushed me to marry both of these sides together.
Going forward, I hope that the confidence I’ve gained in both practices — especially in holding them close together — will keep going and develop further! I’m quite keen to make space in the coming years to not just write more, or produce live projects, but blend both together with my own creative work at the heart of it. One thing that I think that I have been privileged to have over the last ten years or so is to have been continuously asked to write music, and also to have had the chance to programme music and projects. I’m looking forward to taking more of a leap into bridging both sides — delving into composing projects I initiate and curate at the same.
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Euchar Gravina’s upcoming Jerwood Composer+ showcase, Once upon a place, takes place Saturday 3rd October at LSO St. Luke’s – tickets are available at:
Learn more about Euchar and his practice:
- https://www.euchargravina.com/
- http://soundcloud.com/euchar-gravina
- https://www.instagram.com/euchargravina/
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